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[LUG] Debian: GFDL-licensed works without unmodifiable sections are free

 

This should slay quite a few "pseudo-bugs" in Debian.
http://www.debian.org/vote/2006/vote_001#outcome

The decision means that a Debian package can contain documentation licenced 
under the previously questionable GNU Free Documentation Licence (e.g. 
http://qof.sourceforge.net/) as long as the option within that licence to 
make certain sections unmodifiable (or invariant) is *not* used. The option 
exists to protect ideological elements in a published work (see 
http://www.codehelp.co.uk) that merely reflect the opinion or purpose of the 
original author. It means that documentation that uses the invariant sections 
would go into non-free unless relicensed and republished by the author(s) 
without those sections.

Compare these two statements:

This one is (now) free in terms of Debian:
The copyright licensing notice below applies to this text.
Copyright © 2004 Linas Vepstas
Copyright © 2005-2006 Neil Williams
Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under 
the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later 
version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant 
Sections, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of 
this license is included in the file copying.txt

This one is not:
The copyright licensing notice below applies to this text.
Copyright © 1998-2004 Neil Williams
Permission is granted to copy, distribute, and/or modify this document under 
the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or any later 
version published by the Free Software Foundation; with the Invariant 
Sections being "Principles behind www.codehelp.co.uk", "Peer review of 
software" and "ePatents" only, with no Front-Cover Texts, and with no 
Back-Cover Texts. A copy of this license is included in the file copying.txt

In each case, copying.txt is the same file, the GNU FDL licence.

The invariant sections in the latter are:
http://www.codehelp.co.uk/html/about.html#principles
http://www.codehelp.co.uk/html/about.html#peerreview
http://www.codehelp.co.uk/html/about.html#patents
as identified by the licence. Each section only contains my personal opinion 
of the topic at hand and I've used the invariant section because allowing 
others to change those sections would be to misrepresent my opinion - that 
isn't a case of restricting freedom, it's about protecting the individual. 
It's no good allowing someone to change the section on patents to negate the 
arguments against software patents.

-- 

Neil Williams
=============
http://www.data-freedom.org/
http://www.nosoftwarepatents.com/
http://www.linux.codehelp.co.uk/

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